Something interesting is going on, at least psychologically, at almost any given moment in "The Ballad of Jack & Rose." Alone together on a windswept island off the Atlantic Coast in the mid-1980s, a father and his teenage daughter are living an intense -- and, for us, unsettling -- life in a picturesque setting of ecological correctness. (Jack is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Rose by Camilla Belle.) As the story begins, their Oedipally tinged idyll is about to end, with dramatic consequences. Yet those consequences prove as wearing as they're harrowing. The writer-director, Rebecca Miller, has diluted an extraordinary richness of texture and emotional complexity with a too-muchness of schematic, sometimes didactic drama. The two central performances are superb, but a third role is significant too -- a poignantly funny young man, Rodney, who wants to be a hairdresser; he's played by Ryan McDonald. Rodney provides welcome relief from the relentless intensity -- not comic relief, just the presence of an eccentric kid who's full of small surprises.

Rebecca Miller's previous film, the very fine "Personal Velocity," moved with the speed suggested by its title: three vivid stories of three vivid women. This time she's shooting for something different (though with the same shooter, Ellen Kuras, whose cinematography manages to be exciting and self-effacing at the same time.) "The Ballad of Jack & Rose" folds at least three themes into the same story: the history of a utopian commune that Jack founded on the island in the late 1960s; his efforts to sustain the ideals of the commune, which failed a few years later, by battling a developer (Beau Bridges) who's putting up a suburban-style development on land that Jack reveres; and the relationship between this powerful father, seriously ill with a heart condition, and the daughter who loves him passionately, and who has been suffocated and isolated by his love.

That the last theme is dominant may come as no surprise, since Ms. Miller and her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, are both children of legendarily powerful fathers: Arthur Miller and C. Day-Lewis. (The actor also starred in the film version of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible.") This is not to say the father on screen has been idealized. To the contrary, he's a fallen visionary who's been driven half-crazy by his various failures, and, by extension, the failure of 1960's idealism. Whatever he may have been, the man we see now is a zealot -- an eco-terrorist, really. He is also a terrible fool. On an impulse, Jack brings his lover, Kathleen (Catherine Keener) and her two sons to live on the island: "an experiment," he calls it, "a new chapter." When Rose responds to Kathleen's presence with lethal jealousy, Jack ends the experiment ruthlessly.

Watching father and daughter can be fascinating. Daniel Day-Lewis is, of course, one of the finest actors of our time; he makes Jack an explosive device of mixed motives and incestuous longings. As her father sickens and declines, Camilla Belle's Rose blossoms. If the film is dominated by the father, Rebecca Miller's ultimate concern is the daughter, a beautiful child struggling to break away and become her own woman. A surprisingly clumsy coda shows the outcome of her struggle, but plenty of clumsiness precedes it in the dramatic -- and programmatic and melodramatic -- end game of Jack's life. (There's even a snake in the despoiled Eden.) "The Ballad of Jack & Rose" has density enough for several films. What's missing is spontaneity, and variety. And, throughout most of the narrative, velocity.

'Guess Who'

Bernie Mac is a formidable comic, but you can tell that his timing is off from his first moments on screen in "Guess Who." And not just his timing. He looks miserable, more often than not, as the bombastic pater familias in this frenzied switch on "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" -- young black woman (nice work by Zo&euml; Salda&ntilde;a) brings white husband-to-be (Ashton Kutcher) home to meet her parents.

It's disingenuous to draw a direct comparison between "Guess Who" and its predecessor. When Stanley Kramer's dramatic comedy opened in 1967, with a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, it played to an audience of adults who were surprised and intrigued by the subject matter -- interracial marriage wasn't something people joked about four decades ago, at least not until Mr. Poitier's impossibly handsome, charming and cultivated physician made laughter permissible. The target audience of "Guess Who" is young, a volunteer army of undiscriminating kids who go to comedies for laughs, not for social commentary, let alone nuance. (Not that Kramer's clever, manipulative film was all that nuanced.) So "Guess Who" is, impurely and simply, a comic premise borrowed, turned around and dumbed down to the level of sketch or sub-sketch humor. (To fill time, the filmmakers fall back on sappy slapstick, even sending Messrs. Mac and Kutcher off to race Go-Karts.)

Having said this, and acknowledging that the new version is probably a shrewd commercial calculation, I must also say that its empty-headedness is appalling. Never mind that caricatures have replaced characters; the pivotal caricature makes no sense. Ashton Kutcher's Simon is supposed to be boyishly charming, and he does have a few pleasant scenes. For the most part, though, he's pitifully charmless, an insipid suitor who literally jumps up and down when he's frustrated. It's good to know that white boys can jump, but this one's a colorless loser.

'Oldboy'

Shakespearean in its violence, "Oldboy" also calls up nightmare images of spiritual and physical isolation that are worthy of Samuel Beckett or Dostoyevsky. Does that suggest a thoroughly off-putting pretentiousness? I hope not, because Park Chan-wook's dark, shocking drama, in Korean with English subtitles, is astonishing as well as punishing to behold.

A surreal thriller combined with a convoluted tale of revenge, it's the story of a Seoul businessman, Oh Dae-su, who wakes up, after a drunken night around town, in a prison that could pass for a tawdry motel. Why is he there? What has he done? Dae-su collects clues from watching TV, but 15 years pass before he makes his way out and begins to discover the identity of the enemy who put him there. (He gets his first lead when a homeless man hands him a cellphone and a wallet full of cash.) "Oldboy" is a showcase for exceptional acting: Choi Min-sik as Dae-su, Lee Woo-jin as his old high-school classmate (thus the title), Gang Hye-jung as a sushi waitress who befriends him. The real star, though, is the filmmaker, Park Chan-wook. His film is not for the weak of stomach or heart, but it's a stunner all the same.

'Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous'

Sandra Bullock used to be an acquired taste, but she may have become unacquirable. The crudeness of the stuff she struts in "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous" must be seen to be believed, though I'm not suggesting you actually see it. In the first "Miss Congeniality," her wistful bumbler of an FBI agent, Gracie Hart, went undercover as a beauty-pageant contestant and was chosen runner-up. The sequel is mostly about Gracie's newfound celebrity. Now she's a beautiful bumbler, too famous to do ordinary agenting. Other reviews may detail the events that culminate in the heroine's near-demise, trapped by her own feather boa, semi-Isadora Duncan-style, in the flooded hull of a fake pirate ship in the lagoon of a Las Vegas hotel. I'll confine this reviewlet to observing that her FBI partner in the strenuous idiocy is an on-again-off-again psychopath played by Regina King, and that the film ends on an admirable note of biracial sisterhood and hopes for world peace.

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DVD TIP: One of Daniel Day-Lewis's most remarkable -- and least often-remarked -- performances was as the frontier scout Hawkeye in Michael Mann's spectacular screen version of "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992).

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